Automatic Recognition of Anatomical Regions in Computed Tomography Images

Abstract

This paper presents a method that can recognize anatomy regions in Computed Tomography (CT) examinations. In this work the human body is divided into eleven regions from the foot to the head. The proposed method consists of two main parts. In the first step, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to classify the axial slices of the CT exam. The accuracy of the initial classification is 93.4 %. As the neural network processes the axial slices independently from each other, no spatial coherence is guaranteed. To ensure the contentious labeling the initial classification step is followed by a post-processing method that incorporates the expected order and size of the anatomical regions to improve the labeling. In this way, the accuracy is increased to 94.0 %, the confusion of non-neighboring regions dropped from 1.5 % to 0.0 %. This means that a continuous and outlier free labeling is obtained. The method was trained on a set of 320 CT exams and evaluated on another set of 160 cases.